You can't beat entropy, or prevent it. All you can do is change its distribution.
So, one way to look at living things is that each one is a local depression in entropy. But because you can't make something from nothing, each living thing has to broadly increase entropy in their environment, in order to decrease it locally.
Thus if we envision entropy as a surface, a living thing is not a depression from a flat plane, but rather more like a hill with a steep depression in the middle.
But again, since you can't have something from nothing, life can't arise from an environment of maximum entropy. In order for life to come into being, local entropy must be low enough for a hill to develop. This is where the entropic definition gets into trouble, because the local low-entropy environment around here is provided by the sun. And if you define life as any local depression of entropy, then it raises the question of whether the sun is alive.
Maybe it's better to think of life as a system, not an attribute. To use an analogy, you wouldn't look at a single wave in a rapid in isolation, and wonder what it is. Without the broader context of the river, you'll never understand how the wave came to be there. If every living thing is a like a ripple in the local entropic surface, we can point to individuals, but could only really understand them if we consider the whole picture of the solar system.